by Michael Goldfarb ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 3, 2009
A simple, accessible popular history.
Longtime London-based journalist Goldfarb presents a wide-ranging survey of Jewish self-empowerment since the French Revolution.
After their dispersion with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the Jews migrated across the globe, enduring enforced isolation and marginalization in the lands they inhabited. As a result, they kept their religion, dress and mores largely intact, and often did not speak the language of the host country. Goldfarb looks at the leap in Jewish assimilation and integration since the Jews were awarded “active” citizenship at the time of French Revolution. Under Napoleon, who further effected emancipation as his army made its way into Prussia, Poland and Russia, the Jews were nonetheless subjected to a series of “infamous decrees” that imposed religious restrictions, fees and even rules about choosing names. While traditionally Jews were relegated to trades of tinkering and money lending—they were also barred from owning property and entering academia—they were now allowed into fields such as medicine and the arts. Some became influential in defining a new Jewish identity, as evinced by the “Jewish salon” flourishing in Berlin in the 1790s. Goldfarb offers mini-biographies of many of the significant figures of the 18th and 19th centuries—including Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Gabriel Riesser, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud—most of whom were writing in the face of fierce anti-Semitism breaking out in Germany, Russia and elsewhere. Some, like Moses Hess, became convinced that Jews could never safely live among Europeans, and Zionism took root. Goldfarb concludes with a consideration of the ramifications of growing anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair.
A simple, accessible popular history.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4796-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
HISTORY | JEWISH | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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